Copyright

by

Jeremy J. Beaudry

2002
 Meaning Building:

Aldo Rossi and the Practice of Memory

by

Jeremy John Beaudry, BFA

Thesis

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School

of The University of Texas at Austin

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Master of Science in Architectural Studies

The University of Texas at Austin

December 2002
 Meaning Building:

Aldo Rossi and the Practice of Memory

APPROVED BY

SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:

_____________________________

Michael Benedikt

_____________________________

Stephen L. Ross
To Mom, Dad, and Meredith for unwavering support
Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism:
they always result in more or less fortunate
misunderstandings. Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable
as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are
unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever
entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works
of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside
our own small, transitory life.

Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

+ preface

This thesis asks questions about meaning in architecture and the

importance of memory in that meaning. As an investigation of how

architecture means, this work begins with my story because I am the subject

of this thesis and because, as such, I am mostly responsible for the meaning I

“find” in the world; that is, the meaning I make of it. That is meaning

building, which is really what this thesis is written of. (Notice I did not write

“written about.”)

Architecture happened to me. It continues to happen to me.

Architecture happened to me, and I remember it.

There was a time when architecture happened to me and I was not

conscious of its happening. That architecture was an architecture of the

everyday, and, as such, I could not see it. The walls around me and the roofs

over my head were invisible. In fact, that which I experienced and perceived

was life spilling over the edges of architecture: inside to sleep and eat,

outside to play and travel; me in my bedroom, my sister in the living room,

my father standing in the doorway, my mother walking down the hall. The

world contracts or expands depending on our relationship to very specific

spaces; our perception of the world is ever (never) complete depending on

the edges of architecture.

vi
 Later, there was a time when architecture happened to me and I

became conscious of its happening. I remember it. I remembered it. Meaning,

I first became conscious of architecture happening to me as it happened to

me in my memory. Meaning, the architecture was just an image, but an

image of such profound significance that it single-handedly provoked me to

embark on what can only be called my “life’s work”—meaning architecture.

Meaning meaning. Meaning building. Meaning building. Building meaning.

Making meaning out of the memory of architecture.

Curiously, I first noticed architecture as it appeared to me in an image,

as a brief flash in my memory. I was a painter; I quickly drew it on paper.

Where did it come from? It was familiar yet vague; it was the place I had

never been but revisited everyday for the past year. Some ancient loggia in

Italy—in Cinque Terre, by the sea? or in Rome, on the bank of the Tiber?

(The previous year, I had lived in Rome and studied art and art history.) I

became obsessed with the image. I made paintings about it, returning to it,

exploring it (at this time I was working in a dingy studio in the midst of a

very cold and gray Philadelphia winter).

With the passing of a few years, architecture and its memory has

asserted itself as the subject of my paintings and drawings and writing.

Then I see an image in a theory of architecture seminar: Aldo Rossi’s

Teatro del Mondo built for the 1980 Venice Biennale—and it’s like that image

of the loggia. I am staring at this slide projection of Rossi’s Theater of the

World floating on a barge around the canals of Venice, and how can it be

that I remember it? Of course, I knew I had never seen it before, never

vii
stepped foot inside this tiny little theater. But it still meant so much to me,

and I knew it

Fig. 1. Aldro Rossi, Il Teatro del Mondo, Venice, 1979. Reprinted from
Gianni Braghieri, Aldo Rossi: Works and Projects, 3rd Ed. (Barcelona 1997), 118.

was a place that I would always miss. (A while later, I returned to Italy and

to Venice. Everywhere I turned I saw the ghosted image of the theater

drifting by—rocking gently in front of San Giorgio, docked at the Piazza San

Marco, mimicking the old customs house near the Giudecca.) Rossi writes in

viii
A Scientific Autobiography: “In order to be significant, architecture must be

forgotten, or must present only an image for reverence which subsequently

becomes confounded with memories.” This is the place where our

autobiographies converge.

As a note to the reader: Please keep in mind the spirit of Rilke’s

cautionary epigram—that there is much about a work of art, much about the

world, which is “unsayable.” I have endeavored to encourage that extra-

verbal dimension in this project by including elements that are visual (my

paintings and drawings, for example) and that are analogically related to the

focus of this thesis. Do not always look for answers in what can be patently

“said.”

An extended work such as this thesis is necessarily influenced by so

many people and experiences—some fleeting, some more substantial—and it

is difficult to give each of them the credit they deserve. That said, I am

particularly grateful to Steve Ross, whose expansive mind and radical

pedagogical style has greatly contributed to the development

(methodologically and conceptually) of this thesis as well as my thinking

about architecture in general. During the course of his Practice Theory

seminar in the fall of 2001, many challenging and fruitful discussions with

him and my classmates provoked me to reevaluate general assumptions

about the very nature of architecture which I had accepted as true.

Michael Benedikt was instrumental in the completion of this work.

His encyclopedic knowledge of architecture and his skillful review of the

manuscript have improved it greatly. I would also like to thank Samantha

Krukowski of the Radio-Television-Film department in the College of

ix
Communication, who provided many insightful comments during the early

stages of my work.

Finally, I must give great thanks to my interdisciplinary studies co-

conspirators, the small (very small) group of categorically illusive mavericks

to which I belong—Eleanor Eichenbaum and Hillary Proknow. These two

incredibly intelligent and creative people gave me great support and

encouragement during my time at the university. Together we shared many

frustrations and many more successes.

x
+ table of contents

preface | vi

+ introduction: meaning building as thesis | 2

+ working definition of an analogical system | 8

+ middles: territories of meaning | 12

+ tacit knowing and material practice | 18

+ from The Architecture of the City to A Scientific Autobiography | 33

+ active memory | 45

+ Aldo Rossi and meaning building | 60

+ drawing on architecture drawing on memory drawing on meaning | 71

+ epilogue: l’architecture des ombres | 81

appendix A: consequential data | 87

appendix B: excerpts from A Scientific Autobiography | 96

bibliography | 101

vita | 107

xi
An Architecture of Memory (1st Room)

1
+ introduction: meaning building as thesis

The goal of this thesis is to consider Aldo Rossi’s writing, drawing,

and architecture as a provisional gathering of components that comes

together to mean more than the sum of those individual components.1 Bound

together analogically, this structure frames a multidimensional, in-between

space where the richness of memory and the progressive practice of making

collaborate to elicit poetic meaning. However, the repercussions of this

program of analysis are manifold: for one, it suggests a novel approach to

understanding Rossi’s oeuvre and practice as comprised equally of his

buildings, writings, and drawings. In exploring the intersections and

superimpositions of these creative processes and products, my method

circumvents the reductive and the taxonomical, and retreats from definitive

statements; it desires to be of its subject rather than about it. By seeking out

this analogical system, this approach also points to the character of the

experience Rossi intends the inhabitants of his buildings to have: it is an

engagement with the architecture that is conceived of as a complex

admixture of memory and experience, history and invention. If Rossi

appears committed to both a strictly formal aesthetic and a rigid theory of

1
I am indebted to Steve Ross for my understanding of the concept of “more-
than-ness”, which is very similar to holistic thought, although “more than”
that, too. For his treatment of this concept, see Ross (1990 and 1999).

2
design throughout his entire oeuvre, it is so because in that diligence he sees

a logical method by which he can anticipate and encourage meaningful

interaction with his buildings.

Extending beyond the boundaries of Rossi’s particular theory and

practice, though, the larger scope of this inquiry concerns what I call meaning

building, a thesis which intends to interpret, complicate, expand, and enrich

the difficult problem of how we construct and apprehend meaning in the

world—especially the environment built by man.2

Meaning. Building.

Meaning building.

Building meaning.

Which is to say making meaning by building, making meaning in

buildings. Building by building.

One of the main proposals of this thesis is that memory—

autobiographical and collective, each integral to the other—exists as the

foundation upon which meaning is built. Memory affords our connection to

the world. Every aspect of experience becomes enveloped in the process of

memory. It forms our identity as individuals, and it coheres individuals

together to form the identity of social groups. Memory is also the thread

which links the lived-in now with the past and the future: what I remember

of my past contributes to who I am now (at this very moment) and in many

ways affects what I will do in the future. Without memory, meaning

building cannot happen.

2
I am grateful to Andrew Kramer, who is partly responsible for the genesis
of the phrase “meaning building”.

3
 I believe that Aldo Rossi, whether stated explicitly or not, ultimately

took this claim to task out of the necessity to temper his early polemics about

a theory of design with a commitment to an architecture of intense poetry, of

unquantifiable artistry, an architecture conscious of ifs autobiographical

significance. Underlying the rationalist tendencies of Rossi’s theoretical

work is a deeply felt reverence for the power of memory, both his own as

well as the collective memory of a particular culture or society that is

embodied in key architectural types. And the force of memory permeates

his entire oeuvre to such an extent that it is almost pathological, or cultish, or

verging a nostalgia, at the very least. For Rossi, the process of memory

analogically suggests the evolution and morphology of the physical form of

the city; and a formal language based on a typology of architecture; and, as a

matter of necessity, the repetitive, obsessive, and dynamic nature of his own

creative practice.

It seems evident to me that in the course of finding meaning in the

built environment there must somehow occur a meshing between an

individual’s memory and the embodied memory of the architecture itself.

To speak of a building as having memory is to discover its relationship to

time and to history. In terms of the former, a building will inevitably age—

as time goes by it acquires a kind of patina (although I do not employ this

word only to describe surface qualities) as the physical object registers the

indexical marks of its use over time—the scratches and blemishes, coats of

paint and cosmetic facelifts, additions and subtractions—and as the events

and activities which occur there and transform construct a narrative about its

age. A building’s memory also depends upon its visible relationship to

4
history, which may be manifest through style or type. Each and every

building will always visibly express its relationship to time in this way just

by the very nature of it being a man-made artifact. As physical

constructions, buildings exist in time and in place.

Similarly, as inhabitants of buildings, we each bring to any building a

unique personal history which is dependent upon our individual,

autobiographical memories—this is what we have at our disposal when

confronting the built environment. The special quality of this relationship—

the interaction of memories between building and inhabitant—requires all

the semantic fullness of the word context. Not only does context denote “the

circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in

terms of which it can be fully understood;”3 but it must also be understood

in light of its Latin etymology: contextere, literally “a weaving together.”

Admittedly, many aspects of the context in which we engage buildings are

variable—environmental qualities like time of day and year or psychological

qualities such as mood or intention—but we will always bring with us our

histories, and a building will always display a portion of its history to us.

Memory of architecture, therefore, seems to depend more on

our ability to perceive the embodied situation. Moreover
those situations are subject to particular catalytic moments in
time—those instances in which the energies of both the
container and the contained become virtually
indistinguishable. The timing of those moments is uneven,
poetic, and anisotropic. It would be impossible for the
constituent elements of a place-memory to sustain a constant

3
Concise Oxford Dictionary, 10th ed., s.v. “context.”

5
 equilibrium or frequency of resonance in time. (Bloomer
1987:30)

In this way, as users of buildings, we are responsible for meaning building in

that we must bring to architecture our memories and experiences and

complicated selves in order to complete its meaning. We encounter every

possible type and quality of building, and to some degree we will feel

compelled to engage it and we will discover—that is, construct—meaning in

that engagement. Or not. Perhaps only when, as Bloomer claims, the

boundary between the “container” and the “contained” dissipates, when the

embodied memory of the architecture resonates with our memories and

experiences—perhaps then meaning is made.

6
An Architecture of Memory (4th Room)

7
+ working definition of an analogical system

An analogical system is comprised of parts which stand in some

significant relationship to each other; which share certain attributes,

circumstances, or relations; which possess a reciprocal necessity—that is,

each element (analogue) is required in order for the entire structure to be

meaningful. The analogical system is holistic.

Consider this brief etymology of the Greek “analogos”:

aνa- : the usage of the prefix ana- denotes “up, back, again,
intensification”

-λογος : logos—and its various declensions (-logy, -ology, etc)

—refers to the faculty of speech, the saying of something in
regards to a particular subject4

Therefore, analogical denotes a “saying or speaking” between elements

(“back” and “again”) for the purpose of emphasis (“intensification”). Here,

the connotative meaning is clear: in an analogical system, the individual

analogues of that system communicate back and forth, “speaking” about

their relationship in order to bring the particular subject to light. Yet,

speaking is, perhaps, not the ideal gerund here; the action is more of a

pointing to, a gesturing towards in which the analogy is suggested rather than
4
Pocket Oxford Greek Dictionary, revised ed., s.v. “aνa-” and “-λογος.”

8
described: “Analogical thought is archaic, unexpressed, and practically

inexpressible in words” (Jung qtd in Rossi 1976:74).

The analogical system manifests itself in a variety of forms and

cannot be confined to any one milieu. Analogues will be visual, aural,

tactile, olfactory, gustatory. They will be abstract and representational,

images and sounds, words and ideas, objects and textures. The great

expressive potential of analogy resides in this multiplicity of forms and

relationships and in the myriad possibilities of signification which can only

be cultivated by analogical thinking. If “the hallmark of contemporary

experience is an absence of in-betweenness,” as Barbara Maria Stafford

admits (1999:10), then the identification and elaboration of analogical

systems becomes a redemptive practice capable of navigating a productive

course through fixed, reductive, and authoritarian (either/or) versions of

understanding.

Ronald Schleifer, a professor of English and medicine, skillfully

traces the development of analogical thinking in the modern and

postmodern eras, claiming that the turn of the twentieth century gave rise to

a period of invention, a “post-Enlightenment” era which supplanted

inherited values of the Enlightenment, notably those “modes of

representation that take reduction and hierarchy to be the ‘methods’ of

science and wisdom” (2000:1). Standing in marked contrast to this mode of

thought—epitomized and inaugurated by Descartes’ “clear and distinct

ideas”—analogical thinking

9
 is not reductive, or at least not reductive once and for all.
Instead, it presents momentary or emergent insights by noting
similarities, rather than identities, that suggest trajectories to
pursue rather than resting places to inhabit. […] Analogies do
not present or assert positive entities, invariants, essences.
Instead, they offer insight and frameworks of understanding
born of relationships that can always be apprehended as
provisional, the source of beginning rather than ending.
(2000:24)

The exceptional characteristic of analogy is that the constituent analogues

“retain their individual intensity while being focused, interpreted, and

related to other distinctive analogues” (Stafford 1999:9). In doing so, the

analogical system maintains a complex, multivalent structure which allows

for shifts, overlays, tension, and depth—in short, those “frameworks of

understanding” which encourage inventive and productive interpretations.

10
An Architecture of Memory (13th Room)

11
+ middles: territories of meaning

Analogy gathers together scattered factors and, to one degree

or another, judges the importance of its gathering. Such
judgments, however, are provisional: they take place outside
the imperative of choosing once and for all. That is,
analogical knowledge, like narrative itself, suspends the law
of the excluded middle. Instead, it offers versions of
comprehension—configurations, analogies, wholes that do
not erase parts—that can, in fact, be superimposed upon one
another precisely to create "middles." (Schleifer 2000:15)

The semantic core of the analogical system resides at the conceptual

intersection of the individual parts of the analogy, that zone created by the

superimposition and superposition of essentially translucent entities. The

active light of interpretation shines through these layers, as it were,

illuminating significant shapes and figures. Meaning actively happens here;

it is constructed as images overlap each other, aligning themselves

momentarily, then shifting slightly, encouraging reevaluation and

reinterpretation. As a layered figure of depth in architecture, complexity

occurs in both plan and section. As a site, the zone of meaning in the

analogical system is often ambiguous, never a statement of “once and for all”

(2000:24) nor a mandate issued from some authorial power—there is space

and freedom, room for “play.” Yet, also as a site, this area has boundaries,

12
Fig. 2. Superimposition and superposition in an analogical system.
Paintings and digital manipulation by the author.

13
or, rather, a set (largely unquantifiable) of all available meanings, which is

different than a boundless field of all-inclusiveness or unregulated

interpretations.

Although not referring specifically to analogy, the French designer

and theorist, Bernard Cache, offers a fascinating and complicated (and

refreshingly non-linguistic) model of an in-between space where significant

meaning arises from the rich interaction of vectors, inflections, and frames (see

also Deleuze 1993:15, 19). A frame is any number of “geometrical figures of

identity”—which is to say that a frame is basically any perceivable form: in

the words of Focillon, any “construction of space and matter” (1948:2). While

possessing some rigidity, the frame, however, is a variable structure which is

never autonomous from its substantive “skin”: “The rigid parts of the frame

still retain a certain geometry, but their articulation is mobile and their

equilibrium results from the play of tensions that run through the system as

a whole” (Cache 1995:108). A vector—evident in the frame—represents a

directional thrust, a selection made at a given instant. For Cache, the vector

is able to express numerous values, in effect existing as a kind of historical

document which does not necessitate a hierarchical organization but instead

merely demonstrates a quality in and of itself. The vector, having direction

and magnitude, is both an abstraction as well as a concrete figure.

The identification with mathematics is obvious here and becomes

even more entrenched (and technical) in the concept of inflection, that image

which suggests a moment of choice and possibility—literally, the change in

curvature from concave to convex. According to Cache, on any given curve

14
Fig. 3. Points of inflection.

there are the “extrema”—the maximum and minimum points which are

singular only in relation to the entire vector—and in-between these are

points

of inflection, “intrinsic singularities” which exist independent of the vector

(1995:16-17). Expanding this mathematical figure, imagine the maximum

and minimum points as those images which are most readily perceptible in

the world: the peaks of mountain tops, the edges of lakes, the most popular

movie, the worst team in the league, “the best possible images.”5

Conversely, inflection

5
By image, Cache means “anything that presents itself to the mind” (1995:3).
His sense of this term is greatly influenced by the writing of Henri Bergson,
especially Matter and Memory (1911).

15
 is the mark of images that can’t be the best, and that are thus
outside the world and its inclines, though they are a part of it.
Take any surface. Generally, we describe its relief in terms of
summits and crests, basins and valleys. But if we can manage
to erase our coordinate axes, then we will only see inflections,
or other intrinsic singularities that describe the surface
precisely. They are the sign that the best possible are not
given, and that the best are not even called forth. (1995:36)

This is the territory of meaning. And Cache’s understanding of the

in-between, that subtle, fleeting glimpse of the point of inflection, points

directly to the essential, operative potential of the analogical system: the

opportunity to discover in the “middles” an abundance of significant

meaning, rich and dense, multivalent and ambiguous. “[I]nflection

represents a totality of possibilities, as well as an openness, a receptiveness,

or an anticipation” (1995:17).

16
An Architecture of Memory (49th Room)

17
+ tacit knowing and material practice

The “middles” which arise in the analogical system become the site

of meaning building. Here, practice and production culminate (but never

“once and for all”) in a moment of ineffable clarity; and this moment of grace

is inherently tacit rather than patent. Tacit knowledge is that which is

understood or implied without being stated; it depends upon visceral

experience, learning by participation, and a whole set of “unconscious

factors that are culturally as well as biologically filtered and influenced”

(Berman 1981:348). Conversely, patent knowledge is obvious, easily

recognizable, articulated and mediated by figuration.

Morris Berman, in The Reenchantment of the World, provides a telling

example of tacit knowing. Borrowing an anecdote from Michael Polanyi, he

relates the experience of medical students learning to identify pathologies in

x-rays, a skill which cannot be taught categorically with a list of instructions

or a set of procedural guidelines. They learn by observing senior doctors

over a period of several months, by watching the more practiced

professionals as they discern what each miniscule blur or hairline or speck in

the image discloses about the patient. The x-rays and their identifying

marks cease to be figurations of disease—that is, signs which must be

contemplated and then translated into significance—instead becoming

somewhat transparent; the student eventually just “sees” disease without

18
deliberately and rationally contemplating its sign (1981:138-141; see Shiff

1996:323-28 for an insightful essay on figuration).

Polanyi, a scientist-turned-philosopher who spent the better part of

his career developing a theory of personal knowledge based on the principle

of tacit knowing, conceived of tacit knowing as a relation involving two

terms: the proximal and the distal—where the proximal is the totality of the

particulars in the tacit relation and the distal is the comprehensive meaning

of that relation. In apprehending the meaning of an entity, we “attend from”

the proximal (particulars) to the distal (meaning); and it is the proximal of

which we have a tacit knowledge without being able to articulate it (1966:10).

Borrowed from the field of anatomy, the terms are appropriate considering

Polanyi’s privileging of the body as “the ultimate instrument of all our

external knowledge, whether intellectual or practical” (1966:15). The body

—“which we normally never experience as an object, but experience always

in terms of the world to which we are attending from our body” (1966:16)—

is the medium of tacit knowing, and it is through “indwelling”,

incorporating the particulars into our body via proximity and extension, that

we truly understand the relational work of the proximal and distal:

We shall presently see that to attend from a thing to its

meaning is to interiorize it, and that to look instead at the thing
is to exteriorize or alienate it. We shall then say that we endow a
thing with meaning by interiorizing it and destroy its meaning by
alienating it. (1969:146)

19
 Polanyi accepts the theory of gestalt as a particular model of tacit

knowing: in visual perception we attend from a number of particulars

(sensations given by vision, by the body) to their meaning as a whole, which

is the perception. Taken individually, the proximal elements are

meaningless until they are attended to at a certain distance, being the distal

(Polanyi refers to this process as “transposition”) (1969:146). If we consider

again the example of medical students learning to “read” disease in x-rays,

this conception of tacit knowing may become clearer. The tacit relation

consists of the marks on the x-rays (proximal) and the meaning of the marks

(distal) which is either normal or pathological. And the students, while

never able to articulate the proximal, over time come to associate (attend

from) certain combinations of marks and blemishes and spots with a

comprehensive meaning (distal) which is the presence of disease. “Let us

recognize that tacit knowing is the fundamental power of the mind, which

creates explicit knowing, lends meaning to it and controls its use” (1969:156).

Meaning building—the compound activity of perceiving, learning,

inventing—describes a process by which meaning and significance are

generated via tacit knowing. In Vision and Painting, Norman Bryson uses the

tacit operation as one of the key components in his analysis of painting, a

work which also offers a strong critique of previous methodologies of art

historical analysis (1983). Reaching far back into the annals of time, his

investigation begins with Pliny’s account of Zeuxis and his rival painters,

one of whom is so skilled in the art of trompe l’oeil that he in fact deceives

the great Zeuxis, who mistakes a painted image of a curtain for the real

thing. This, of course, has been the dominant discourse regarding

20
representation in the western world—a “natural attitude” which has as its

logical culmination an “Essential Copy” of reality in the image (see 1983:1-

32). Bryson tells us that this attitude within the field of art history has

changed very little, making only slight modifications by introducing

historical relativism; that is, the “Essential Copy” is still the desirable aim

but it is relativized and specific to particular epochs and social periods.

Ernst Gombrich, in the 20th century, is the first to suggest a challenge

to this notion of the painter as a naïve and innocent instrument of the

faithful representation of the real. Working within the milieu of the

philosophy of science, Gombrich posits that the painter during any given

epoch inherits a set of representational schemata which influence how he

depicts his world. Therefore, the challenge to the artist is to test these

schemata against his own experimental observations of nature, thus

augmenting the representational schemata and moving it ever closer to a

more accurate version of reality. Of course, perceptualism (as this theory is

called) still arrives at the same intellectual impasse: the “doctrine of mimesis”

which necessitates “a description of representation as a process of perceptual

correspondence where the image is said to match… with varying degrees of

success, a fully established and anterior reality” (1983:38). Bryson remedies

the rigidity and social isolation of formalism with the assertion of the

painting as sign, as the site of cultural production, as material practice, where

“the real ought to be understood not as a transcendent and immutable given,

but as a production brought about by human activity working within

specific cultural constraints” (1983:5). As an area of inquiry, material

practice encompasses not only the work of the painter, but also the work of

21
the viewer: both are involved in tacit operations, “improvisations-within-

context” which yield significance by way of meaningful engagement and

interaction with practical and tangible work—much like the medical

students learning to read x-rays. In the territory of meaning—the “middles”

of the analogical system—material practice catalyzes the process of meaning

building as we begin to explore that in-between zone.

22
An Architecture of Memory (21st Room)

23
+ selected buildings by Aldo Rossi

24
Fig. 4. Top: Aldo Rossi, Monument and town square, Segrate, 1965. Photo
by the author.

Fig. 5. Bottom: Aldo Rossi, Friedrichstaadt Housing block, Berlin, 1981-88.

Reprinted from Aldo Rossi, Aldo Rossi: Architect, 195.

25
Fig. 6 & 7. Aldo Rossi, Gallaratese housing block, Milan, 1969-70. Top: Photo
by the author. Bottom: Reprinted from Aldo Rossi, Aldo Rossi: The Life and
Works of An Architect, 49.

26
Fig. 8 & 9. Aldo Rossi, San Cataldo cemetery, Modena, 1971-78. Photos by
the author.

27
Fig. 10 & 11. Aldo Rossi, San Cataldo cemetery, Modena, 1971-78. Photos by
the author.

28
Fig. 12 & 13. Aldo Rossi, Fontivegge commercial district, Perugia, 1982.
Photos by the author.

29
Fig. 14. Top: Aldo Rossi, Town hall, Borgoricco, 1983. Reprinted from Aldo
Rossi, Aldo Rossi: Architect, 119.

30
Fig. 15. Bottom: Aldo Rossi, New building for the Bonnefantenmuseum,
Maastricht, 1990. Reprinted from Aldo Rossi, Aldo Rossi: The Life and Works
of An Architect, 273.

31
Fig. 16. Top: Aldo Rossi, Contemporary art center, Vassivière, 1988.
Reprinted from Aldo Rossi, Aldo Rossi: Architect, 148.

Fig. 17. Bottom: Aldo Rossi, Teatro del Mondo, Venice, 1979. Reprinted
from Aldo Rossi: The Life and Works of An Architect, 88.

32
An Architecture of Memory (22nd Room)

33
+ from The Architecture of the City to A Scientific Autobiography

Let us consider the scope and evolution of Aldo Rossi’s projects,

drawings, and writings by selecting two obvious textual “moments” in his

career which provide opportunities to mark and assess his creative and

intellectual development: The Architecture of the City, first published in 1966,

and A Scientific Autobiography, of 1981. These markers are useful in sketching

the prevalent themes and motives—constant, yet at times shifting focus—

which became the theoretical foundation of a life’s work. As a skilled and

practiced writer (says Rossi: “My education was basically a literary one…”

[Rossi 1994:15]), Rossi set forth his theories in several published articles,

essays, books, reflections, and project descriptions; and these present to us

unequivocal evidence (nearly) of the worth of his evolving

architectural/critical vocabulary—“typology,” “history,” “memory,” the

“analogical,” “the city,” “rationalism,” to mention the most outstanding.

Perhaps more relevant to this project, though, these writings reveal Rossi’s

changing attitude towards his thesis and its expression in his creative

practice.

In The Architecture of the City Rossi formulates a theory of typology in

architectural design and urban design based upon a rigorous study of the

history of the Western city (Berlin and Rome are prime examples) which is

supported by references to diverse sources borrowed from the fields of

34
geography, urban ecology, and collective psychology.6 As an impressive

scholarly work, The Architecture of the City clinically catalogues and codifies

Rossi’s interest in the city-as-architecture based on his study of rationalism

and typology in architecture, thus laying the groundwork for a thesis which

will inform all of his subsequent creative work. The “precise meaning” of

this theory of design is concisely stated in the introduction to the second

Italian edition of the book:

…to consider the city as architecture means to recognize the

importance of architecture as a discipline that has a self-
determined autonomy (and this is not autonomous in an
abstract sense), constitutes a major urban artifact within the
city, and, through all the processes analyzed in this book,
links the past to the present. (1982:165)

An understanding of architecture that stresses its “self-determined

autonomy” is bound to an iteration of a typology of architecture. The

problem of type is extremely important to Rossi’s theory of autonomy

because building types are elemental in determining the form of

architecture, and they are not dependent upon—that is, not causally related

to—a specific, fixed function. In this way, Rossi repeatedly refers to the

Palazzo della Ragione in Padua as an example of a building which is a model

of a particular type (the palazzo) but hosts a multiplicity of functions (it is

now a commercial marketplace). In fact, Rossi’s iteration of type constitutes

6
Rafael Moneo’s early article on Rossi, which appeared in Oppositions and
was probably America’s first introduction to Rossi’s work, begins with an
excellent and concise analysis of The Architecture of the City (1976).

35
a new typology of architecture, one which Anthony Vidler has identified as

the “third” typology in an essay from 1977 (1978).7 This “third” typology

posits the city itself as the foundation of architectural types in defiance of the

previous typologies derived from nature and the machine.

The first typology is exemplified by Laugier’s allegorical image of the

primitive hut: primitive man, seeking shelter, “discovers” the form of the

rustic hut in the trunks of trees (columns), the boughs (lintels), and the

canopy of branches (roof, thus pediment). Implicit in this conception is the

fundamental order of Nature allied with the perfect geometry of platonic

forms. Vidler maintains that this emphasis on the natural origins of

architecture led to an interest in the classification of types in architecture

(analogous and contemporaneous to efforts to classify various species within

the animal kingdom), and each individual building became recognizable as

belonging to a particular “species” of buildings. A contemporary of Laugier,

J. N. L. Durand, wrested this notion of typology away from its organic

origins in order to establish the natural history of architecture as dependent

on its own history apart from the history of Nature. In this way, architecture

is primarily a matter of construction, and Durand formulated “the basic

elements of construction, according to the inductively derived rules of

composition for the taxonomy of different building types resulting in endless

combinations and permutations,” a method which also accommodated the

invention of new building types (Vidler 1978:29).

7
See also Vidler’s article “The Idea of Type: The Transformation of the
Academic Ideal, 1750-1830” (1977) for lengthier history of type and
architectural theory.

36
 At the end of the 19th century, as the onslaught of the final decades of

the Industrial Revolution prepared the way for the mass production of

machines by machines, the second typology arrived, thus counting

architecture as one of many in a range of mass-produced objects. In the

hands of modernists like Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, “buildings were

to be no more and no less than machines themselves, serving and molding

the needs of man according to economic criteria” (Vidler 1978:30). Rossi

describes this kind of causal relationship between social conditions and the

formal aspects of architecture (the effect) as “naïve functionalism”, a

consequence of the modern movement of which Rossi (and the third

typology) is explicitly critical. The force of this critique resides in the

exultation of architectural form as the only object of study because form—

architecture as construction—is continuous throughout time and therefore

indexically registers its own history; whereas function or social mores

change according to forces independent of architectural form, and cannot,

then, serve as a rule for understanding architecture. Summarizing the

importance of an autonomous architecture for Rossi, Rafael Moneo captures

the essential program of The Architecture of the City:

Research in architecture thus leads to the study of the specific

aspects of architecture which allow it to be understood as an
autonomous discipline… a discipline that cannot be
understood exclusively through external parameters but
which can be established through appropriate formal rules.
Through the idea of autonomy, necessary to the
understanding of the form of the city, architecture becomes a
category of reality. (1976:4)

37
 Rossi seems to have cultivated his interest in “research in

architecture” through his study of Etienne Boullée (a study which led him to

translate Boullée’s Architecture, essai sur l’art into Italian and write an

introduction to that text) and the brand of rationalism which this

Enlightenment figure represented. According to Rossi, “Boullée was a

rationalist because he applied a logical system to architecture [and] was

committed to constantly verifying the presuppositions in his various

projects, and a design’s rationale had to relate to this system of logic”

(1989:41). Alan Colquhoun has traced the evolution of rationalism as a

philosophical concept in architecture (it is interesting that he does not

include Boullée in that history), placing Rossi as one of the architects at the

end of that trajectory. Rationalism has meant different things to different

historical periods, and Colquhoun speculates that this ambiguity may have

prompted Rossi to ally himself with the term (1975:365). Either way, the

rationalism of the young Italian architects of the mid-1960s with whom Rossi

was affiliated was based upon a “new formalism”—distinct from the

formalism of modernism—which saw “the invariant elements of architecture

as irreducible beyond the experience of architecture itself, as a social and

cultural reality”, thus capable of describing the history of architecture as “a

continuous instant in which thought and memory are coextensive”

(Colquhoun 1989:84).

By privileging the experience of architecture, Rossi is really

advocating a case by case understanding of the architecture of the city via an

empiricism which, by definition, must focus on individual and singular man-

38
made objects simply because the experience of the city is bound by

inevitable physical parameters. The city is an artifact comprised of other

urban artifacts, each with its own individual locus within the city, each a

singular constructed element, each the site of a succession of events.

Subsequently, referencing such thinkers as Lewis Mumford and Claude

Lévi-Strauss, Rossi postulates that the urban artifact may be studied as a

work of art, as a man-made thing par excellence born of the unconscious.

A conception of architecture as a man-made urban artifact and as an

autonomous discipline which exhibits a unique, self-referential history (the

third typology) come together with the permanence of type to stress the

continuity of the city through time, the link between the past and the

present. “The city is in its history,” writes Rossi;

…it is an event and a form. Thus the union between the past
and the future exists in the very idea of the city that it flows
through in the same way that memory flows through the life
of a person; and always, in order to be realized, this idea must
not only shape but be shaped by reality. (1982:32, 131)

Although he rather simplistically equates history with the collective memory

of a city based on his reading of Maurice Halbwachs, it is important to

distinguish the nature of this history—one which is conveyed through

(urban) artifacts, revealed in form—from an entirely authoritative History

which acts as the official document of a particular culture or society. While

the evolution, constructions, and destructions of the city do depend upon the

decisions made by those in power, the people who use the city do much to

39
influence this largely unwritten history. The city as collective memory “does

not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners

of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the

antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked

in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls” (Calvino 1974:11).

The Architecture of the City, then, advocates a rational study of the

form of the city—the residential areas (the quartier), primary elements and

monuments, the persistence of the plan through time. The belief is that this

analytical method will provide an enlightened understanding of the city as a

whole comprised of many fragments and will inform the design of new

structures for the city (and Rossi claims that this process is applicable to

cities both old and new). In other words,

the design phase of new urban features consists in a reversal

of the techniques of analysis and a reapplication of the
principles discovered in the formal and spatial data of existing
cities. In practice, this requires exhaustive studies of the
successive layers of urban change, as well as a detailed
comparison of the various building types that characterize a
particular locality. (Stewart 1976:111)

With this very laborious and elliptical text, Rossi emulates the role of

architect-scholar, or architect-scientist, which is in keeping with his

admiration of the rationalism of Boullée, and employs the scientific method

as a way to counteract the “sins” of the modernist “fathers”. These “sins”

Colquhoun has exposed as part and parcel of the paradoxical doctrine of the

Modern Movement, a strange mixture of the “biotechnical determinism” of

40
functionalism and “a mystical belief in the intuitional process” of design

(Colquhoun 1996:254). The Architecture of the City is Rossi’s attempt to give

logical expression to a return to architecture as architecture.

Sixteen years later we read Rossi reflecting on his intentions in The

Architecture of the City, reflecting, that is, on his unwillingness or inability to

discern the emotional essence of his interests in architecture and the city:

At that time, I was not yet thirty years old, and as I have said,
I wanted to write a definitive work: it seemed to me that
everything, once clarified, could be defined. I believed that
the Renaissance treatise had to become an apparatus which
could be translated into objects. I scorned memories, and at
the same time, I made use of urban impressions: behind
feelings I searched for the fixed laws of a timeless typology. I
saw courts and galleries, the elements of urban morphology,
distributed in the city with the purity of mineralogy. I read
books on urban geography, topography, and history, like a
general who wishes to know every possible battlefield—the
high grounds, the passages, the woods. I walked the cities of
Europe to understand their plans and classify them according
to types. Like a lover sustained by my egotism, I often
ignored the secret feelings I had for those cities; it was enough
to know the system that governed them. Perhaps I simply
wanted to free myself of the city. Actually, I was discovering
my own architecture. (Rossi 1981:15-16)

This passage from the first pages of A Scientific Autobiography explains his

obstinacy in the early text, but its tone also exemplifies the timbre of Rossi’s

creative work as it reached maturation in the years after publishing that 1966

41
“treatise”. Now, it is the poetic, rather than—as the title of the

autobiography suggests—the scientific which guides his projects and

writing. Having once “scorned” memory, he embraces those “secret

feelings” as the dominant theme of his entire oeuvre, indeed “exchanging

‘History’ for ‘Memory’” (Vogt 1983:87). In A Scientific Autobiography Rossi

has not necessarily abandoned the investigations and conclusions of The

Architecture of the City, with all of its complicated subordinate concepts, but

he seems to reveal the underlying motivations for these initial theories,

motivations which are deeply personal and connected to profound

memories of images from his childhood and developmental years. Rossi is

stripping away the self-conscious scholarship of The Architecture of the City

and developing an autobiographical narrative about the importance of

observation, repetition, type, and the singularity of experience in his projects

—which really is to say the importance of memory. Writing with an

eloquent melancholy which somehow never quite degenerates into

pathological nostalgia, he seems a man obsessed with the memory of a

handful of specific places and things from his native north Italy: the statue of

Il Carlone, the chapels of the Sacri Monti, Filarete’s column in Venice, the

anatomical theater in Parma. Yet, in spite of, and because of, this insistent

longing and cyclical cataloging of memories, A Scientific Autobiography is

characterized by a persistence, a relentless or mechanistic need to keep

going, and this momentum propels Rossi forward into the future through a

kind of historical endurance.

42
 …Rossi repeats a scheme that he has already experimented
with, displaying his work as the result of the final screening of
the progressive depositing of “residues” of different types just
as, in Rossi’s special cultural world, the city is the form of a
whole made up of parts, of differences, and above all of a
sedimentation of the forms and types that endure the attrition
of history. (Dal Co 1979:69).

That taxonomical interest in typology which is so fundamental in The

Architecture of the City finds a fully poetic expression in A Scientific

Autobiography. For Rossi and his colleagues of the 1960s, the resurgent

interest in architectural types provided a way to mend the rupture with the

past for which the modernists had been responsible. If modernists stripped

their architectural forms of any recognizable associations with the history of

architecture in order to capture l’esprit nouveau, then Rossi’s (and others’)

attention to type cleared a path towards rejoining the continuity of the

history of architecture by “rewriting” the city as an evolving formal

structure of architectural signs which “re-present the past through their

strategies of writing” (Boyer 1994:188). M. Christine Boyer notes Rossi’s

gradual modification of his initial theories of the city—which were probably

constrained by their reliance on a model of structural linguistics—so posing

the question: “As every city carries within it the landscape and architectural

remains of other cities, and as a memory image is a fragment of a deep-

seated notion or an archetype, might the irrational call and untranslatable

message of archaic symbols be utilized to disrupt the linear codes and

rational conventions of language?” (1994:189). By placing more emphasis on

43
this kind of “memory image”, Rossi allows his conception of typology to

become more overtly poetic and autobiographical:

I am referring rather to familiar objects, whose form and

position are already fixed, but whose meanings may be
changed. Barns, stables, sheds, workshops, etc. Archetypal
objects whose common emotional appeal reveals timeless
concerns. Such objects are situated between inventory and
memory. Regarding the question of memory, architecture is
also transformed into autobiographical experience; places and
things change with the superimposition of new meanings.
(Rossi 1976:74)

By the time Rossi compiles A Scientific Autobiography he has already

entrenched himself “between inventory and memory”. In pursuit of an

architecture which can be “transformed into autobiographical experience”

and which accepts “the superimposition of new meanings”, his exhaustive

search for those meaningful moments in his life leads him to exchange a

typology of architecture with a typology of the memory of architecture. It is a

subtle transposition which is no great conceptual stretch because an

explanation of the process of memory depends upon a complex coordination

of generic and episodic representations of the past. This description of the

structure of memory is analogically related to Quatremère de Quincy’s

notion of type and model in architecture, the definition of typology to which

Rossi subscribes.8 The elaboration, repetition, and recombination of a few

8
Quatremère de Quincy’s definition of type, as quoted by Rossi: “The word
‘type’ represents not so much the image of a thing to be copied or perfectly
imitated as the idea of an element that must itself serve as a rule for the
model… The model, understood in terms of the practical execution of art, is

44
memorable architectural forms is the foundation of Aldo Rossi’s modus

operandi, whether in drawing and painting, the buildings, or the writing in

A Scientific Autobiography.

an object that must repeated such as it is; type, on the contrary, is an object
according to which once can conceive works that do not resemble one
another at all. Everything is precise and given in the model; everything is
more or less vague in the type. Thus we see that the limitation of types
involves nothing that feelings or spirit cannot recognize…” (Rossi 1982:40).

45
An Architecture of Memory (40th Room)

46
+ active memory

Within the fields of both cognitive psychology and philosophy, the

literature regarding most aspects of memory is vast. A historiography of this

corpus would reveal (like the historiography of any field) dominant and

subordinate theories whose promotion and acceptance depends upon a

range of epistemological inheritances and research methodologies,

professional rivalries, and technological innovations, to name a few factors

(see Brewer 1995). In the face of such a large quantity of research and

writing, my inquiry into some cognitive theories of memory was guided by a

need for an understanding of memory more directly relevant to the heart of

this project: namely, the role of memory in the work and process of Aldo

Rossi. A schema-based theory of memory appears to me as most

appropriate.9 Modern schema theory is best defined as one which holds

that the mind employs “generic knowledge structures that guide the

comprehender’s interpretations, inferences, expectations, and attention”

(Graesser and Nakamura 1982:60). These are high-order, unconscious

structures: “high-order” because schemas are primary means of organizing

knowledge, and “unconscious” in that they are deeply embedded into our

cognition of the world. Frederick C. Bartlett (1886-1969) is hailed as the

9
I owe my introduction to this particular body of research on memory to
Remembrance and the Design of Place by Francis Downey (2000).

47
forefather of contemporary schema theory as published in Remembering

(1932). Bartlett questioned the popular trace theory account of memory

which held that memory is episodic, such that specific, actual “traces” of past

experience our stored directly for later recall. For Bartlett, memory is a

dynamic process:

Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed,

lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative
reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our
attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past
reactions or experience, and to a little outstanding detail
which commonly appears in image or in language form. It is
thus hardly ever really exact, even in the most rudimentary
cases of rote recapitulation, and it is not at all important that it
should be so. (1932:213)

Brewer and Nakamura (1984:125-6) find that Bartlett actually proposed two

slightly different versions of the theory in Remembering: the “official” view,

known as pure reconstructive recall (absolutely no specific episodic

representation of new information is retained in memory) and the

“unofficial” view, as evident in his actual data, of partial reconstructive

recall (recall as a joint function of a schema component and a specific

episodic component). It is the latter which has been embraced by the

majority of cognitive psychologists working with schema theory and

memory today.

In modern schema theory, there are five operations in which schemas

specifically affect memory (Brewer and Nakamura 1984:143-52): attention,

framework, integration, retrieval, and editing.

48
  Attention  Schemas influence what objects and events are encoded

into memory by directing an individual’s attention towards either

schema-relevant or schema-irrelevant material, such that high degrees

of attention lead to better recall.

 Framework  Schemas act as frameworks for episodic information, such

that the framework accepts a range of possible values regarding

information relevant to the schema.

 Integration  Schema-based information is integrated with episodic

information at the instance of input, such that the memory will contain

both generic and episodic information in varying degrees dependent

upon the type of schema and the time interval between input and

recall.

 Retrieval  Schemas facilitate retrieval, guiding recall for schema-

relevant information.

 Editing  Schemas, working apart from the process of memory,

influence what is communicated about the specific memory.

Let us consider the schema theory of memory in terms of a real

scenario: a trip to a baseball game. Having been both a player and spectator

of baseball, I possess a rich set of schema and sub-schema for “baseball

game” which organizes and influences my knowledge and memories of

baseball games. It will also influence my experience of future baseball

games. Each baseball game I have attended is integrated into this baseball

schema so that I have generic knowledge about baseball games which

includes information like the structure and rules of the game, the sensual

qualities of the baseball field and stadium, the various activities and rituals

49
of the spectators and players, etc. There are also a number of sub-schema,

such as the experience of eating a ballpark hotdog and using the stadium’s

public restroom. According to schema theory, when I remember a particular

baseball game many of the so-called episodic details of that experience may

in fact be incorrectly inserted simply because I have certain expectations

about my experience of baseball games based upon my schematic

knowledge of them. Likewise, there may be omissions of those details which

were too incompatible (and also, too insignificant) with my “baseball game”

schema. The schema for attending a baseball game is constructed by these

experiences and changed by them, altered or reinforced as new information

is integrated.

Any consideration of memory, then, must address the question of

whether or not the process of remembering leads to accurate, veridical

representations of the past. In fact, accurate or not, we do strongly believe

that our memories are not only our own but are true, which may be in part

due to the high level of detail of the imagery that accompanies our memories

(Rubin 1995:4-5). Of course, except in extreme cases of mis-information

leading to harmful false memories (see Belli and Loftus 1995), some

discrepancy between what really occurred and what I believe to have occurred is

probably not so devastating to the sense of identity which our

autobiographical memories assist in constructing. In characterizing the

interconnectedness between individual (autobiographical) memory and the

collective memory of a particular social or cultural group, Maurice

Halbwachs noticed that we depend upon those around us to corroborate our

50
individual memories, and thus work together to build each individual’s

“collective memory” of the group to which we belong (1980:22-3).

The implications of this are that alienation from a group may lead to

a forgetting or at least an uncertainty about the accuracy of one’s individual

memory, a more tentative relationship to memory which is possibly

pathological. We may also wonder if, at any point, the memory of the group

—and its power of corroboration, of persuasive suggestion—actually

supercedes the memories of the individual, thus corrupting the very

personal and organic relationship between memory and the sense of self.

Especially in our own time, we are inundated by the Image, that hyperactive

stream of constructed visibility which leaves no time for contemplation. As

Walter Benjamin, quoting Duhamel, wrote: “I can no longer think what I

want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images”

(1968:238). Are we then faced with “a memory crisis of too many images,

too phantasmagorical, too commodified, that inhibit the recall and

recollection of images stored in the mind” (Boyer 1994:27)?10

Boyer also tells us, in The City of Collective Memory, that the other

aspect of the memory crisis concerns a rejection of a unified collective

memory as the acceptable transmission of “our” story as a society and a

culture. In the midst of the projects of modernism and postmodernism, the

desire to establish “counter-memories” reflects this distrust as well as the

10
Not everyone admits this “crisis of memory.” Marita Sturken, for example,
claims that cultural memory in the modern and postmodern eras, rather than
be lamented as corrupted or pathological, must be understood as a
“changeable script” which abandons wholeness in favor of “cultural
reenactment” as means to emotional and psychological healing (1997:19).

51
urge to break with convention, with received notions of the way things are.

Benjamin perceived a similar dilemma in his own time, noting that narrative

and story—essential elements in an healthy relationship to memory and

history—were being replaced by fragmented, disconnected images, the

“shock experiences” of the modern metropolis whose symptoms were

disorientation and disengagement. Benjamin’s antidote to this dream state

was to use familiar, memory-laden artifacts as “shock experiences”

themselves which might enable the spectator “to think through dream

images and to achieve a critical awareness of the present” (Boyer 1994:23-9).

In attempting to understand the power which memory exerts in our

everyday lives—lives full of mundane details and extraordinary moments, of

loss and discovery—we have the opportunity to probe an elaborate structure

of meaning which so often brings together apparently unrelated,

anachronistic, and fractured events, concepts, and images. Our memories

are absolutely significant to who we are as individuals, as well as our sense

of ourselves and personal identity (in effect, constituting our personal lore,

our autobiography). In this way, we may make a distinction between the

effulgent mass of visual culture and the equally bright and complex strata of

individual memories, as Baudelaire did:

An important difference exists between the palimpsest

manuscript that superposes, one upon the other, a Greek
tragedy, a monastic legend, and a chivalric tale, and the
divine palimpsest created by God, which is our
incommensurable memory: in the first there is something like
a fantastic, grotesque randomness, a collision between
heterogeneous elements; whereas in the second (memory) the

52
 inevitability of temperament necessarily establishes a
harmony among the most disparate elements. However
incoherent a given existence may be, its human unity is not
upset. All the echoes of memory, if one could awaken them
simultaneously, would form a concert—pleasant or painful,
but logical and without dissonance. (Quoted in Boyer
1994:479)

Within the context of contemporary visual culture, the sheer excess of

constructed images, their relentless production and transmission (the

“palimpsest manuscript”), tends to decrease the acuity of our understanding

to the visual world—that is, our desire to scrutinize the vast field of images

in the world. The content of memory presents a similar stream of images to

the mind, yet this montage refers directly (we hope) to our uniqueness as

individuals, existing as a collection of lived experiences, relationships,

abilities, perceptions, ideas. Memory is the territory of meaning; it is the

fundamental process by which we establish our relationship with the world.

53
An Architecture of Memory (25th Room)

54
+ selected drawings by Aldo Rossi

55
Fig. 18 & 19. Top: Aldo Rossi, Architecture, 1972. Reprinted from Vittorio
Savi, L’architectura di Aldo Rossi (Milan, 1985), 87. Bottom: Aldo Rossi, Urban
Composition with Monument, 1973. Reprinted from Aldo Rossi, Aldo Rossi:
Projects and drawings 1962-1979 (New York, 1979), 154.

56
Fig. 20-23. Top left: Aldo Rossi, Study for a Monument to the Resistance, 1970.
Reprinted from Vittorio Savi, L’architectura di Aldo Rossi, 49. Top right: Aldo
Rossi, The Hand of the Saint, 1976. Reprinted from Vittorio Savi, L’architectura
di Aldo Rossi, 88. Bottom left: Aldo Rossi, Composition with S. Carlo – cities and
monuments, 1970. Reprinted from Aldo Rossi, Aldo Rossi: Drawings and
Paintings, 95. Bottom right: Aldo Rossi, Composition with Bridge, 1970.
Reprinted from Aldo Rossi, Aldo Rossi: Projects and drawings 1962-1979, 15.

57
Fig. 24-27. Top left: Aldo Rossi, Untitled, 1981. Top right: Aldo Rossi,
Untitled, 1993. Bottom left: Aldo Rossi, Untitled (Casa Bay), 1975. Bottom
right: Aldo Rossi, Gauloises caporal, 1971. All reprinted from Aldo Rossi, Aldo
Rossi: Drawings and Paintings, 105, 8, 119, 106.

58
Fig. 28-30. Top left: Aldo Rossi, L’architecture assassinée, 1974. Top right:
Aldo Rossi, Il Teatro del Mondo, 1987. Bottom: Aldo Rossi, Dieses ist lange her
– ora é questo perduto, 1975. All reprinted from Aldo Rossi, Aldo Rossi:
Drawings and Paintings, 64, 150, 171.

59
Fig. 31-33. Top right: Aldo Rossi, The Hand of the Saint, 1973. Top left: Aldo
Rossi, Architettura razionale e immagini celesti, 1974. Bottom: Aldo Rossi,
Untitled, 1984. All reprinted from Aldo Rossi, Aldo Rossi: Drawings and
Paintings, 90, 93, 40.

60
An Architecture of Memory (6th Room)

61
+ Aldo Rossi and meaning building

In order to be significant, architecture must be forgotten, or

must present only an image for reference which subsequently
becomes confounded with memories. (Rossi 1981:45)

Recall that elsewhere in this thesis we have invoked a method of

inquiry that promotes analogical thinking. In other words, by considering

Aldo Rossi’s creative process as an analogical system comprised of

individual components—his buildings, drawings, writings—we are

engaging a way of thinking about his work which is “not reductive” but

(hopefully) “presents momentary or emergent insights” and uncovers

“frameworks of understanding” (Schleifer 2000:24). This methodology

would be entirely appropriate to the study of Aldo Rossi if such attempts at

understanding his meaning are of the subject rather than about it. As early as

his introduction to the second Italian edition of The Architecture of the City,

Rossi had begun to articulate the idea of the “analogous city”, an analogy in

and of itself that asserted that the relationships between different

architectural types and forms could be manipulated in order to induce new

meanings in those spaces, in the architecture of city. In subsequent years, as

his writings and projects were infused more with the narrative of his

autobiography, analogical thinking became fundamental to his poetic

62
process: through the activity of remembering and repetition he filtered a

longtime interest in the typology of specific architectural forms.

Yet, Rossi’s poetic was not as self-absorbed as it may seem—or, at

least, it was not ultimately meant to turn in on itself in the creation of a

restrictive reverie. He expected his obsession with memory to translate into

his buildings in such a way that it would invigorate architecture with a new

liberty, a freedom of experience and meaning similar to so many of those

buildings he had discovered and cited in The Architecture of the City: the

Palazzo della Ragione in Padua, the Roman amphitheater-turned-market

square in Lucca, the tiny fishing huts along the Po River valley—buildings

that, while displaying characteristics of specific types, transcended the

program of those types by accommodating changing activities and uses. By

analogically relating the transposition of architectural types with the process

of memory, Rossi was privileging meaning building with his architecture as

an integral part of the built environment, especially as it governed the

evolution of cities. Indebted to an understanding of meaning borrowed from

linguistics, he would have appreciated the “critical animism of signs”

proposed by Charles Pierce: “[E]very symbol...is a living thing, in a very

strict sense that is no mere figure of speech. The body of the symbol changes

slowly, but its meaning inevitably grows, incorporates new elements and

throws off old ones...[A] symbol, once in being, spreads among the peoples.

In use and in experience, the meaning grows” (Quoted in Rochberg-Halton

1986:192).

Meaning building.

Meaning building.

63
 Building meaning.

Meaning. Building. Verb becomes noun, action becomes object;

and then object transgresses its own boundaries back into the realm of

action…

It is how Rossi engaged the profound memories of his past. It is how

he anticipated people would live with and within his buildings, seeing in

those forms their own memories of an architectural past, encouraging them

to reactivate those connections, those relationships in his buildings. “The

emergence of relations among things, more than the things themselves, always gives

rise to new meanings” (Rossi 1981:19; emphasis mine). Perhaps, like this:

Confront the built form—it reminds you of other buildings and other experiences

you have had before—this new building feels familiar and established in your

understanding of “the given”—yet, you experience this building as something

different, it’s meaning has changed from what you thought it should be because of

the change in how you use the architecture—“the given” is expanded, enriched with

new meaning… meaning building. It is how Rossi “practiced” architecture—

by working analogically from drawings to buildings to writings, discovering

relationships, exploring the space where meaning happens, in between those

things which can be explicitly articulated, patently expressed.

Rather than specify how a building is to be used or interpreted, Rossi

preferred to create a theatrical architecture, always preparing the space of

the “just-before”, an architecture of anticipation where the scenario

described above might unfold. Stylistically, Rossi found recourse in a formal

language of maximum and redundancy—or, a prolific “redundance of

simplicity” (dal Co 1978:8)—and repeatedly invoked those “familiar objects,

64
whose form and position are already fixed, but whose meanings may be

changed. Barns, stables, sheds, workshops, etc” (Rossi 1976:74). It is

important to remember that this formal simplification is not the inevitable

result of his interest in typology—such reliance on type does not predicate

minimal buildings, does not really predicate any specific aesthetic quality

whatsoever. Rossi added to his interest in the types of architecture a

deliberate ambiguity of signification in order to complicate those typological

associations. To instantiate the model of a particular architectural type which

is ambiguous (silent) about its relationship with that type or its attitude

towards the history of that type is to enter into a strange architectural world

where a poetic reservation impresses upon us the desire to contemplate (and

complete) the meaning of that world. Or so Rossi hoped. “Faced by your

designs or buildings, one is often overcome by a strange feeling, a mixture of

familiarity with something already seen and recognized, and the alienating

effect of a rather strange poetic vision” (Huet 1994:17). It is as if the building

is waiting for the activity of its use to complete the architecture.

This semantic ambiguity in his buildings has been the source of both

positive and negative criticism. On the one hand there are his admirers, who

are willing to venture into the arena of ambivalent signs—

aware that recourse to such elementary, non-figurative and

archaic geometrical figures was not only a way to escape the
garrulity of ‘speaking’ architecture to achieve, through
silence, the effect of the great architecture of the past, but at
the same time to open the gates of the collective imagination,
the memory attached to these forms.” (Huet 1986:212)

65
And they are willing to suspend the associations of his buildings with Fascist

architecture, prisons, and mental hospitals in order to pursue the “sacred

stillness” of this architecture of absolute purity—this purity precludes any

attempts to historicize these ambiguous forms (Jencks 1978:212-14).

Negative criticism directed at Rossi rebuts such white-washing as either

simple naïveté or blatant irresponsibility (Buchanan 1982 and Vogt 1983).

Responding to Rossi’s projects for the Modena cemetery and the Gallaratese

apartment building on display in the 15th Milan Triennial exhibition, Joseph

Rykwert, for example, lamented its extreme “abstraction of architecture from

all ideology”—an architecture of “sublime uselessness”, “dumb and

beautiful maybe, but dumb” (1973:4).

However, this refusal to speak, this “dumbness” of signification, is

essential to Rossi’s idea of architecture. In A Scientific Autobiography, Rossi

recalls a statement from a lecture he once gave in Zurich: “Meine

Architektur steht sprachlos und kalt [My architecture stands mute and

cold]”; he is alluding to a poem by Frederic Holderlin: “Die Mauren

stehn/Sprachlos und Kalt, im Winde/Klirren die Fahnen”, which is “The

walls stand/mute and cold, in the wind/the banners creak.” And this

muteness is not really a withholding of sound or words, but rather an

absence, the ineffable, “a way of saying nothing and everything” (Rossi

1981:44). Profound silence characterizes the space of the in-between and is

an essential feature of analogical thinking where the world lies just beyond

the grasp of logical thought and verbalization. It also characterizes the

territory of meaning where material practice and tacit knowing occur.11

11
See pp. 18-22.

66
Indeed, “tacit” comes from the Latin tacitus, meaning “silence.” In the

silence (tacitus) of Rossi’s forms and buildings, meaning and knowledge are

intended to be tacitly inferred by its inhabitants; that is, meaning is both

immanent and imminent, i.e. indwelling and waiting to be discovered by the

those who dwell there.

Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch write that “all knowing is action…

[it is] participation through indwelling” (1975:42, 44; emphasis mine). Tacit

knowing depends upon our ability to focus our attention away from the

particulars of a situation towards their joint meaning, the “more-than” of

these subsidiary parts working as a whole (see also Ross 1990 and 1999). For

example, consider a pointillist painting by Georges Seurat, who creates an

image by amassing hundreds of tiny, colored dots of paint (pixels) on the

canvas. In such a picture, if we move too close to the painting and focus on

the particulars (the dots) which form the image, that image—its joint

meaning—breaks apart; in understanding the meaning of the image, we “see

through” the pixels in order to know it (1975:34). When Rossi privileges an

architecture of silence and ambiguity, a forgotten architecture, he means to

keep architecture from imposing a set of prescribed limitations or particular

meanings upon the inhabitants so that the experience becomes not about the

declaration “Here is Architecture” but one where the user, taking full

advantage of tacit operations, begins to construct their own relationships

and meanings within the space according to how it is engaged and used—in

a sense, “seeing through” the particulars of the building. The architecture is

not inconsequential, but it can never be the focus of attention. For Rossi, this

means limitations and reservations and ambiguity—“mute and cold”—so

67
that the inhabitants supply their own words and warmth and life to the

buildings, directing their attention towards the meaning of experience rather

than on the particulars of formal expression in architecture.

This process is akin to Norman Bryson’s conception of material

practice as a creative activity which constructs meaning. In writing of

representational simplification in proto-Renaissance paintings, he makes a

comment appropriate to Aldo Rossi’s architecture: “Contemplating these

despecified, evacuated forms, it is for the viewer to construct and to

improvise the forms into signification, through the competence he has

acquired from his own experience of the tacit operations of the connotational

codes…” (1983:76). As the site of cultural production, then, we are

compelled to interpret the sign “as material work, practice of painting and of

viewing; production, productivity” (130-1). As we have seen, though, with

Rossi, the connotational codes exhibit a deliberate muteness (sprachlos) in

order to cultivate an ambiguity of signification. Yet, the cultivation of

ambiguity does not imply a total lack of shared meaning, or a completely

relativized and chaotic hermeneutical free-for-all. Rossi brings his

architecture back from the brink of total abstraction by his careful insistence

on the power of memory to connect him, his writings, his drawings, his

buildings to the inhabitants of his architecture, to the cultural memory of

those inhabitants; in other words, as Francesco dal Co has realized, his

architecture “expresses a maximum simplification which corresponds to the

most powerful fullness of a narrative plot developed with architectural

forms to shape an enchanted space animated solely by memory” (1978:10).

68
The latent structure upon which all of these analogical associations hinges is

the typology of architecture.

By accepting the modern schema theory of memory—that memory is

a dynamic process, consisting of both generic and episodic components and

influencing such factors as what is stored or what is recalled in memory—we

are in a position to admit that Aldo Rossi is unwittingly relying on (tacitly

inferring?) this conception of memory as the substantive foundation of his

creative work. In a sense, he is working through memory according to the rules

of schema theory; he is attempting to strike a difficult balance between

generic and specific elements in the staging of his architecture. According to

William Brewer, schema theory

proposes that one has to consider sets of events as potentially

having a generic representation and a set of unique episodic
representations; and that repetition of the episodic events
leads to interference in memory for these representations,
while at the same time leading to improved memory for the
generic aspects of the events. (Brewer 1995:51)

Rossi’s formal vocabulary is, in many ways, incredibly generic. By

combining fragments of recognized architectural types in his buildings and

by stripping these buildings (models) of any elements of narrative detail, he

creates a formal and compositional schema, that roster of forms (his

“catalogue”, his “dictionary”) which he repeats in project after project: the

smokestack, the pitched roof, the rectilinear arcade, the Brunelleschian

dome. In each design, however, these generic elements are instantiated with

an increasing complexity marked by “contamination,” the analogical

69
relationships fostered by the correspondences of unexpected typological

elements (see Rossi 1976:74; 1981:19, 35), and therefore become episodic

architectural events within the scope of Rossi’s oeuvre.

Rossi’s constructed architectural world would seem to display a

direct correlation to the schema theory of memory, therefore maximizing the

potential richness of his buildings in their correspondence with the

memories of those who inhabit them. The generic component of his

architecture lies in their reference to identifiable and recognizable types

which situates the inhabitants within the context of a larger cultural and

historical milieu. Then, each experience of his buildings becomes an unique

instantiation (episode) of these schematic, typological forms and

subsequently allows for the construction of new interpretations—the

deformation and evolution of the schema. Schema depend upon “an active

organisation [sic] of past reactions, or of past experiences” (Bartlett 1932:201).

As such, memories are temporary constructions rather than “discrete,

holistic, units” to be excavated from the depths of our minds (Conway

1995:67). Memory is a dynamic process—we reconstruct the past in each

present moment when we remember. For Rossi, the inventive nature of this

process is adopted in order to maintain a relationship to the history of

architecture, but also to inspire new meanings and associations

(correspondences) within that framework.

All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine

explaining or be imagined explaining to himself that what he
sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was
a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he

70
 advanced on his journey, because the traveler's past changes
according to the route he has followed: not the immediate
past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but
the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler
finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the
foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess
lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places. (Calvino
1974:29)

Like the traveler in Invisible Cities, Rossi advances towards a place

lying ahead carried away by a rigorous practice of drawing, discovering an

ever changing past in every image he makes. An architecture which “stands

mute and cold” (generic), yet drawings and paintings which stand

expressive and charged (episodic)—this relationship characterizes the

analogical system comprised of Rossi’s architecture and drawings. Perhaps

constrained by the reserve he must maintain in his architectural designs,

drawing as a material practice allows Rossi’s heart and hand to give itself

over to an entirely direct expression, the indexical representation of his

working through memory. In drawing, his obsession with those profound

memories, scrutinized and mythologized in A Scientific Autobiography, is

transformed into an active engagement with the past which can lead him to

“foreign, unpossessed places” of invention; it is “purposive memory that

touches the present and infuses its wisdom onto the world of experience”

(Rochberg-Halton 1986:190), just barely escaping the clutches of a

degenerative nostalgia.

71
An Architecture of Memory (33rd Room)

72
+ drawing on architecture drawing on memory drawing on meaning

To cite the past is to re-site the present and reveal in it the

instance of the contingent paths that lead us back while taking
us forwards... (Chambers 237)

For an observer as astute as Rossi, dedicated also to observation as

the foundation of an education in architecture, the practices of drawing and

painting are fundamental to Rossi’s engagement. His observations and

memories are filtered and distilled through an obsessive and immediate

drawing practice. Frequently exhibited, this graphic work, too, has been the

object of a critical fascination and success—this tends to mystify and distort

its true relationship to his built architecture, to Rossi’s entire creative

process.12 And, of course, Rossi’s own writing about his drawings assists in

this mystification: “…I made the same drawings over and over, searching for

the web of connections in the life of man” (1981:66). That Rossi was such a

prolific maker of drawings and paintings may indicate an autonomous

artistic life, which can be considered as distinct or separate from his life as an

architect, especially since early on in his career he built fairly little. He

explicitly denies this kind of distinction, though, claiming a unity between

all of his creative media (Huet 1994:15). Yet the relationship between his
12
e.g. Peter Eisenman’s introduction to the American edition of The
Architecture of the City (1982:3-11).

73
architecture and drawings and paintings (and writings) is not as simple as

either of these characterizations. Rossi’s drawings are neither the unusually

“artistic” expressions of a technician nor just another resource in the toolbox

of creativity equal to all others. The drawings are both of these things, but

much more, too.

Elsewhere I have defined the analogical system as a “saying or

speaking between elements for the purpose of emphasis” which creates

territories of meaning (“middles”). This method leads to a description of the

particular relationship between Rossi’s drawings, buildings, and writings

(the analogues) and to an exploration of what meaning this interaction,

intersection, and superimposition of parts creates. Within this analogical

system, each of the analogues “retain their individual intensity while being

focused, interpreted, and related to other distinctive analogues” (Stafford

1999:9)—this notion of singularity is similar to our understanding of

autonomy in architecture. In this way, Rossi’s drawings are not buildings,

nor are they writing. They possess formal properties specific to the medium

and the act of drawing, and they belong to a particular history of

representation and image-making. Yet the drawings are integral to his

creative process and the meaning of his entire body of work—they do

“speak” to his other work, inextricably and analogically enriching each

other.

Perhaps the best way to begin an investigation of these drawings is to

methodically consider their various attributes, posing the question: what is

evident in a typical drawing by Aldo Rossi? and what is not evident?

Significantly, the drawings are not representations of singular, actual

74
buildings and sites, nor are they architectural project drawings—sections,

elevations, plans, presentation renderings—which provide detailed

information about the material or structure or the nature of construction (for

example, compare Figs. 4 and 7 with 18 and 19 and Figs. 8 and 17 with 20-

23). (Of course, due to the practical nature of the profession of architecture,

Rossi and his studio did produce both technical and presentation drawings

when dealing with clients and the actual construction of buildings.) Not

striving for any kind of pictorial realism, they are not illusions of three-

dimensional space which rely on traditional, western perspectival

conventions of spatial representation. In this sense, Rossi’s drawings are not

bound by the parameters we generally assume to influence the architectural

drawing; they do not exist as a “reduction or ‘picture’ of a building” (Perez-

Gomez 1982:5); “thus architecture became primarily the making of the

drawing (or the model), the same poetic act that has always magically

revealed the truth of reality: a process similar to the gnostic search for truth

by the enlightened architect” (7). Here, Alberto Perez-Gomez is commenting

on the projects of Boullée and Ledoux in order to reestablish the importance

of drawing in the overall meaning of architecture. Similarly, Rossi’s

drawings are “poetic acts”, works of self-expression and of self investigation

which constitute a dynamic, material engagement with architecture and its

many possibilities for meaning.

Pencils, pens, markers, watercolor, ink, paint, collage, photocopies of

previous drawings; executed on graph paper and paper scraps, sketchbooks

and drawings pads, newspapers and timetables, pieces of cardboard—these

are the raw materials of Rossi’s prolific drawing practice. And these

75
materials are generally handled with an adeptness whose variable pace

seems to expose the relative urgency of Rossi’s need to realize an image at

any particular sitting (e.g. Fig. 20 and 28). At times, images are carefully

considered and composed: the line is even and nearly orthogonal—perhaps

even ruled—or the overall spatial effect of the drawing is brought to a

cohesive solidity by his attentive use of color and light and shadow,

therefore just surpassing the level of “sketch” (e.g. Fig. 21). Collage elements

may be tightly arranged, planned according to some organizational idea; or

there may a studied level of detail imparted to the objects within the

composition (e.g. Fig. 33). More often than not, though, the drawings are

fast, elemental, expressionistic as Rossi’s line moves frantically and

incrementally in order to discover the image which he has in mind. Swaths

of color are applied as quickly—strokes of marker, watercolor, or pastel are

laid down to suggest light and shadow or merely to rescue some object from

the obscurity of the dense tangle of filament-like marks.

A 1993 catalogue of Rossi’s drawings is a testament to the importance

of this work in a critical evaluation of his entire oeuvre, as well as his

popular success (Rossi 1993).13 As an extensive collection and taxonomy of

several key drawings, this publication is instrumental in giving a shape to

the corpus of Rossi’s drawings according to both their chronology and their

larger themes and subject matter. My intention is not to evaluate this

monograph nor to reclassify the drawings according to an alternative

taxonomical program. Yet, it is true that the drawings lend themselves to

13
Rossi has had several museum and gallery exhibitions of his drawings
throughout his career, and several articles and catalogues have featured his
graphic work.

76
this kind of organization by virtue of Rossi’s persistent repetition of a

handful of images, forms, and representational conventions. He himself

says as much:

Perhaps the observation of things has remained my most

important formal education for observation later becomes
transformed into memory. Now I seem to see all the things I
have observed arrayed like tools in a neat row; they are
aligned as in a botanical chart, or a catalogue, or a dictionary.
But this catalogue, lying somewhere between imagination and
memory, is not neutral; it always reappears in several objects
and constitutes their deformation and, in some way, their
evolution. (Rossi 1981:23)

The immediacy with which Rossi constructs his drawings—making do, like

the bricoleur, with whatever material, whatever images he has on hand (see

Lévi-Strauss 1966 and Koetter and Rowe 1996:279-86 for more on the practice

of bricolage)—and the obsessive searching which this activity indexically

signifies (his line roams the page, like someone in a dark room who must

feel his way through it) consume this catalogue of observations, memories,

and imaginations. After a glance at a few of his drawings, we quickly

become accustomed to familiar objects and images, and then we are

sometimes surprised and attentive when new elements appear. The coffee

pots, the small cabins, the smokestacks and the monumental cubes from the

Modena cemetery, the outline of the arcades in the Gallaratese apartment

building, the hands of San Carlo, the lighthouses—they all reappear

throughout the body of work. As a process and a record of that process, the

special quality of the drawings is that maybe they are never brought to a

77
point of completion but are always provisional, always capable of being

continued. So, in fact, Rossi does make the same drawing over and over

again; yet each drawing presents a different instantiation of those familiar

images and forms: a particular arrangement or composition or quality of

light, a different scale or set of relationships. He imbues them with a unique

specificity that embodies the active processes of both remembering and

inventing: “Likewise in my projects, repetition, collage, the displacement of

an element from one design to another, always places me before another

potential project which I would like to do by which is also a memory of some

other thing” (Rossi 1981:20).

Canaletto’s fantastic views of Venice (the capriccii), particularly one

which depicts two buildings and one unbuilt project by Palladio set

imaginatively along the Grand Canal, were instrumental in suggesting to

Rossi the idea of the “analogous city”, a compositional model in which “the

geographical transposition of the monuments within the painting constitutes

a city that we recognize, even though it is a place of purely architectural

references” (Rossi 1982:166). In many of his drawings, then, he revisits and

reconstructs the “analogous city” repeatedly, inserting and combining

several of his most prominent architectural forms and buildings in

fantastical arrangements and milieus. Rossi adds another dimension to these

images by mingling his architectural forms with such quotidian objects as

coffeepots, soda cans, phonebooks, and cigarette packs, objects which clearly

refer analogically to those formal types so evident in his buildings—cylinder,

cube, cone (e.g. Fig. 24-27). His drawings of these kinds of items obviously

78
reference the long tradition of still life painting in the history of art,

specifically the Cubist fascination with everyday objects as suitable subject

79
Fig. 34. Capriccio, Goivanni Antonio Canaletto, 1753-59. Reprinted from
Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 166.

matter for their formal explorations—the work and technique of Picasso,

Braque, and Le Corbusier, for example. The effect of these strange

juxtapositions of personal items and monumental buildings is to enhance the

imaginative character of the drawings by complicating the scale at which we

are to understand these forms. Are the coffeepot and the phonebook

dramatically enlarged to the scale of the buildings, or are the buildings

miniaturized to the scale of the everyday objects? Like Canaletto’s views of

Venice, these drawings invite us into the space of memory and imagination

where we witness the exploration of Rossi’s remembered observations,

80
images which suggest a reality unto themselves that is analogous to a so-

called “objective”, proper reality.

Of course, we have seen (and so had Rossi) similar depictions of the

space of memory and imagination before in the paintings of Giorgio de

Chirico, whose so-called metaphysical paintings of the early 20th century

show eerily silent and empty Italian piazzas penetrated by late-afternoon

light and punctuated by long shadows. Eugene J. Johnson has noted that a

major exhibition of de Chirico’s paintings, which included several of these

monumental cityscapes, was held in Milan in 1970 and they surely had an

immediate effect on Rossi (1981:48-9).14 The prevalent image of the

smokestack or cone seems directly derived from de Chirico’s images, as does

the convention of placing stark architectural forms within flat, barren

landscapes and modeling them with a wintry light and deep, dark shadows

(e.g. Fig. 21 and 27). De Chirico, too, made the same kind of painting again

and again, and part of these images’ infectious power lies in their

corroboration with the memory of architecture. This is the “de-realization”

of architecture into a primarily “aesthetic presence”, an architecture frozen

dramatically in that stark light and reproduced several times over in that

moment like the memory of some exceptionally haunting and beautiful time

(Harries 1982:65-6). Rossi draws (on) the memory of this moment repeatedly

as well, searching for a poetic meaning in the buildings, spaces, and

experiences of his past:

Rossi also claims an affinity with the work of Mario Sironi and Giorgio
14

Morandi, twentieth century Italian painters.

81
I have always known that architecture was determined by the
hour and the event; and it was this hour that I sought in vain,
confusing it with nostalgia, the countryside, summer: it was
an hour of suspension, the mythic cinco del la tarde of Seville,
but also the hour of the railroad timetable, of the end of the
lesson, of dawn. (1981:80)

82
An Architecture of Memory (60th Room)

83
+ epilogue: l’architecture des ombres

The myth of the origin of painting can be traced back to Pliny’s

account in his Natural History, written in the first century AD. Even at that

time, though, the story was already ancient, part fable, part history.15 The

story is easily told: the daughter of Butades, a potter from Corinth, traces the

outline of the shadow of her lover on the wall as he sleeps the night before

he departs to fight in a war. Thus, the simple act of inscribing the projected

outline of the figure on a wall inspires the entire tradition of pictorial

representation in Western civilization. The dream of the origin of painting is

the desire to wrench from time that which is transient and fleeting—the

lover gone to war—by fixing its shadow in time and place and, by visual

synecdoche, fixing the thing itself. In essence, the image of the lover is an

image borne of the negative, of the absence of light, where the only

contiguous presence uniting the real and its image is the outline, the border

between light and dark, between “this” and “that.”

To mark the shadow of her lover is also to mark the shadow of the

past—memory. As a memento of the young man, his drawn outline on the

15
I first discovered this story and its depiction in western painting in a
contemporary art theory seminar taught by Richard Shiff. See also A Short of
History of the Shadow by Victor I. Stoichita (1997) for more on the significance
of shadows in the history of western art.

84
Fig. 35. L’architecture des ombres (First Iteration). Drawing by the author.

wall gives her cause to remember him, but the image must be completed by

the young woman in her imagination in order to fully express the vital

presence of her absent lover; the outline must be filled in with all the

splendour that remembrance can entail. Interestingly, the story continues

when, after news of the lover’s death in battle, Butades fills in the outlines of

the image with clay, thus modeling in relief an effigy of the departed (and

so, says Pliny, inventing the plastic art of sculpture). However, in this act of

85
memorial perhaps the father has gone too far, has passed into the world of

reified realism where the portrait of death takes precedence over the shadow

of life. The former denies the creative potential of remembering in the

movement towards verisimilitude, whereas the latter promotes it by

remaining analogically related to its subject.

In Pliny’s myth the act of painting transforms the negative into the

positive—an absence is endowed with presence. But there is a dialectical

imperative which binds the figure to its shadow and which suggests the

bond between life and death.

All devotees of deep shadows, from Goya to Giorgio de

Chirico, from Boullée to Louis Kahn, are addicts of the
monumental, that is, they are entangled in the dialectic of life
and death, compensated by deep insights, and threatened by
pathos and manic repetitions. (Vogt 1983:88)

Aldo Rossi, of course, is one such devotee, and the poetic of “the architecture

of shadows” permeates his entire oeuvre. No doubt he finds a special solace

and inspiration in this passage from Boullée’s Essai, which he quotes in his

introduction to that work:

I found myself in the countryside, skirting a wood by

moonlight. My effigy, produced by light, caught my attention
(surely this was nothing new to me). By a special state of
mind, that semblance's effect seemed to me one of an extreme
sadness. What did I see in it? The objects' silhouettes stand
out in black against a light of extreme paleness. Struck with
these feelings, I occupied myself at that moment with making

86
 a special application to architecture... (Quoted in Rossi
1989:46)

Fig. 36. Photo by the author.

We may imagine that the daughter of Butades experienced some similar

effect that night as she contemplated her lover and his shadow cast upon the

earthen wall by the light of a flame. Can we empathize with the prick of

pain she might have felt at his looming departure and the urge to stave off

87
the agony of that separation by doing something, by lovingly capturing that

deep shadow in an image?

In an architecture of shadows, whether manifest in buildings or

drawings, Rossi refers to a profound architectural image: like Butades’

daughter, he marks the outline of the shadow of the past in order to arrest it

from time, in order to inject memory with all the possibility of an

unforeseeable, yet obtainable, future.

It is not by chance that Rossi's work tends to turn in on itself,

that his design inclines toward self-motivation. It tends to
become picture, the last threshold of the sacred; in this course
is contained the narration of an infinite nostalgia for the lost
world of architecture, and for its effectiveness. In the
transformation of the project into pure graphics, maximum
liberty coincides with the exposition of a fully nostalgic
condition. (Dal Co 1978:13)

The desire to repeatedly return to this image of architecture resides in that

space between memory and imagination, between the event and the

memory of the event, between the object and its shadow. It depends upon

the knowledge that presence and absence are figured by an architecture of

shadows, and that that image may suggest an historical continuity, a link

between the irretrievable past, the fleeting present, and the unrealized

future. Aldo Rossi’s poetics of architecture—a practice of building, drawing,

and writing—actively seeks out this very tenuous balance of time. It is a

dangerous proposition. In his journey through the corridors of memory,

always he risks lapsing into a pathological nostalgia; in his silencing of the

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architectural codes in order to anticipate and accommodate future events, he

risks complete abstraction, the abyss of a world without shadows.

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An Architecture of Memory (61st Room)

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+ appendix A: consequential data

Equally important to the development of this thesis are the paintings,

drawings, and prints that I have made over the course of my research and

writing for this text. Recall from the preface that my architectural odyssey

began with a small drawing and subsequent paintings of an image

materialized from the depths of my memory and imagination—this recent

work continues that project with hopefully more complexity and more

understanding of its original motivations. The following color plates (as

well as those which appear at the beginning and end of each of the previous

sections) represent the body of work I have made “in response” to many of

the fundamental ideas embodied in this thesis: the importance of memory in

the meaning of architecture and the omni-presence of architecture in

memory, the similarities between a typology of architectural and memory

schema, the connections between the constructive nature of the process of

memory and the practice and process of painting and drawing and

printmaking. Perhaps more simply stated, though, these works constitute

my visual thinking on that subject. For me, they are an essential contribution

(as in Aldo Rossi’s oeuvre) to the kind of analogical thinking which is

necessary to fully exploring a given subject as well as expressing my

particular relationship to it.

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An Architecture of Memory (11th Room)
1 of a series of 70
lino-cut print, acrylic on paper
4 x 4 ½”

92
 There Is No Place
acrylic, latex on canvas
40 x 50”

93
 Whitewashing
acrylic, latex, oil on canvas
40 x 50”

94
 Chunk
acrylic, enamel on canvas
21 x 24”

95
 Chez L’eau
acrylic on canvas

21 x 24”

96
 Ur-urban
acrylic, enamel on canvas
24 x 21”

97
L’architecture des Ombres (2nd iteration)
lino-cut prints on cut paper, pins,
acrylic, vellum, thread
60 x 52”

98
L’architecture des Ombres (2nd iteration)
details

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+ appendix B: excerpts from A Scientific Autobiography

The essence of A Scientific Autobiography relates to attitude and

technique, rather than to models or solutions, and is therefore
difficult to capture. It is something like the work of a
detective: the murder is committed, and there is nothing to be
done but to follow the tracks of the murderer. (Lerup 1984:59)

Excerpts from A Scientific Autobiography:

Ever since my first projects, where I was interested in purism,

I have loved contaminations, slight changes, self-
commentaries, and repetitions. (1)

If I were to redo this project [the Modena cemetery], perhaps I

would do it exactly the same; perhaps I would redo all my
projects in the same way. Yet it is also true that everything
that has happened is already history, and it is difficult to think
that things could occur in any other way. (15)

Thus the temporal aspect of architecture no longer resided in

its dual nature of light and shadow or in the aging of the
things; it rather presented itself as a catastrophic moment in
which time takes things back. (16)

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Likewise in my projects, repetition, collage, the displacement
of an element from one design to another, always places me
before another potential project which I would like to do but
which is also a memory of some other thing.
Because of this, cities, even if they last for centuries, are in
reality great encampments of the living and the dead where a
few elements remain like signals, symbols, warnings. When
the holiday is over, the elements of architecture are in tatters,
and the sand again devours the street. There is nothing left to
do but resume, with persistence, the reconstruction of
elements and instruments in expectation of another holiday.
(20)

I felt that disorder, if limited and somehow honest, might best

correspond to our state of mind.
But I detested the arbitrary disorder that is indifferent to
order, a kind of moral obtuseness, complacent well-being,
forgetfulness.
To what, then, could I have aspired in my craft?
Certainly to small things, having seen that the possibility of
great ones was historically precluded. (23)

It turns our that this idea of the interior, like the green of the
garden, is stronger than the building itself. You can already
read the project in existing houses, select it from a repertory
which you can easily procure, pursue it in the variants of its
production, in the actor’s cues, in the atmosphere of the
theater, and always be surprised by Hamlet’s uncertainties,
never knowing whether he is truly a good prince, as
everything conspires to make us believe.
Perhaps a design is merely the space where the analogies in
their identification with things once again arrive at silence.
The relationships are a circle that is never closed; only a fool
would think of adding the missing part or changing the
meaning of the circle. Not in purism but in the unlimited

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contamination of things, of correspondences, does silence
return. The drawing can be suggestive, for as it limits it also
amplifies memory, objects, events. (35)

I am disgusted by anyone who speaks of art as “liberation.”

Such a comment belongs to superficial criticism and,
ultimately, to a superficial conception of art. As in the statues
of the Sacri Monti of S., which I passed almost every day,
what I admired was not their art; rather I pursued the
relentlessness, the story, the repetition, and was content that
in some way, even if it were painful, virtue would triumph in
the end. It is like seeing the same film or play many times and
thus being free from the desire to know the end. To
experience this effect I often go to the cinema when the film is
half over or just ending; in this way one meets the characters
in their conclusive moments, and then once can rediscover the
action that happened earlier or imagine an alternative. (38)

This autobiography of my projects is the only means by which

I can talk about them. I also know that one way or another it
does not matter. Perhaps this again signifies forgetting
architecture, and perhaps I have already forgotten it when I
speak of the analogous city or when I repeat many times in
this text that every experience seems definitive to me, that it is
difficult for me to define a past and a future. (53)

Almost paradoxically, whenever there is a loss of desire, the

from, the project, the relation, love itself, are cut off from us
and so can be represented. I do not know how much of this is
cause for joy or for melancholy, but I am certain that desire is
something that exists beforehand or that lives in a general
sense; it cannot coexist with any design process or ritual. At
times I think that the best situation is always that of

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experiencing something after desire is dead; for this reason I
have always loved unbuilt projects… (57)

Memory and specificity as characteristics enabling the

recognition of the self and of what is foreign to it seem to me
the clearest conditions and explanations of reality. Specificity
can not exist without memory, nor can memory that does not
emanate from a specific moment: only the union of the two
permits the awareness of one’s own individuality and it
opposite (of self and non-self). (62)

The widows’ walks on the house of New England recall the

Greek ritual of scanning the sea for what does not return—a
substitution of ritual for pain, just as obsession is a
substitution for desire. Similarly the repetition of the form of
the tympanum on a building does not cause the event itself to
recur. The event might not even happen anyway. I am more
interested in the preparations, in what might happen on a
midsummer night. In this way, architecture can be beautiful
before it is used; there is beauty in the wait, in the room
prepared for the wedding, in the flowers and the silver before
High Mass. (66)

The tower of my Venetian theater might be a lighthouse or a

clock; the campanile might be a minaret or one of the towers
of the Kremlin: the analogies are limitless, seen, as they are,
against the background of this preeminently analogous city. I
think it was at Izmir that I watched and heard the awakening
minarets in insomniac dawns; in Moscow, I experience the
frisson of the Kremlin’s towers and sense the world of the
Mongols and of wooden watchtowers set on some boundless
plain—I sensed things in this way far more than as elements
reducible to those we call architecture. (67)

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We could speak of every project as if it were an unfinished
love affair: it is most beautiful before it ends.
And for every authentic artist this means the desire to
remake, not in order to effect some change (which is the mark
of superficial people) but out of a strange profundity of
feelings for things, in order to see what action develops in the
same context, or how, conversely, the context makes slight
alterations in the action. (78)

In speaking of these objects and projects of mine, I think once

again of ending my work as an architect. It is a task that I
have always attempted. I used to think that my last project,
like the last known city, like the last human relationship,
would be a search for happiness, identifying happiness with a
sort of peace. Yet it may rather be the happiness of an intense
but always definitive restlessness. As a result, every moment
of becoming conscious of things is merged with a wish to be
able to abandon them, to gain a sort of freedom that lies only
in the experience of them, something like an obligatory rite of
passage, which is necessary so that things might have their
measure. (78)

I have always known that architecture was determined by the

hour and the event; and it was this hour that I sought in vain,
confusing it with nostalgia, the countryside, summer: it was
an hour of suspension, the mythic cinco del la tarde of Seville,
but also the hour of the railroad timetable, of the end of the
lesson, of dawn. (80)

Thus, this book is perhaps simply the history of a project, and

like every project, it must be conclusive in some way, every if
only so that it can be repeated with slight variations or

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displacements, or assimilated into new projects, new places,
and new techniques—other forms of which we always catch a
glimpse of life. (84)

105
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+ vita

Jeremy Beaudry makes meaning out of the memory of architecture.

Born the only son of John and Barbara Beaudry in 1974 in Cedar Rapids,

Iowa, he was then set loose in southern Indiana; reigned in in Albuquerque,

New Mexico; discovered in Philadelphia, PA; reborn in Rome; and nearly

hog-tied in Texas. From 1990-93 he studied art with the esteemed Claude J.

Falcone at Penncrest High School, and later received a BFA in painting from

the Tyler School of Art in 1997. The next three years outside of academia

were poorly spent but somewhat adventurous, nevertheless. He continued

to produce and exhibit artwork until entering the University of Texas at

Austin in the fall of 2000.

Permanent address:

106 S. New Middletown Rd.

Media, PA 19063

This thesis was typed by the author—c’est moi.

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